91É«ÇéƬ

I have been studying at 91É«ÇéƬ since 2019, graduating with first-class honours in my undergraduate degree and achieving distinction in my MSc in Principles of Clinical Neuropsychology. My research is driven by a fascination with the social brain and how neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative processes shape our social cognition. I am particularly intrigued by perception science - the idea that each individual experiences a uniquely constructed version of reality, influenced by their environmental experiences, societal influences, culture, language, and neural architecture. This perspective motivates my continued interest into how these perceptual differences manifest within social contexts, and how they contribute to the diverse ways we interpret and navigate our social world.

• MSc: Principles of Clinical Neuropsychology
  2022–2023
• BA: Psychology
  91É«ÇéƬ, 2019–2022

I have assisted with supervisory duties for an intern and MSc student. While not serving as an official supervisor, I have supported these students through data collection activities, task allocation, and teaching and mentoring them through the acquisition of new research skills.

As a graduate instructor, I have assisted in teaching SWaC (Scientific Writing and Communication) and Research Methods courses for first-year undergraduate students. My teaching responsibilities have included delivering seminars and providing individual support to students with assignment drafts, helping them develop their analytical and writing skills.

My current research interests involve investigating how people process information from social cues and dyadic interactions. We can extract social information very rapidly, and we analyse biological motion to make judgements, assess social situations, and adapt our own behaviours based on the personality traits and behaviours of people around us. This allows us to determine suitable responses to novel social environments and interpret the behaviours of people we are unfamiliar with. I am particularly interested in the differences in social information processing between neurotypical people and individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

My current research targets aim to assess how individuals perceive and process distinct dimensions of social interaction, across behavioural judgments, meta-confidence, interpersonal consensus, and underlying neural mechanisms. We have also explored how individual differences, such as autistic traits and camouflaging behaviours, influence the variability in social perception. We have primarily used the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-2) and Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q) for these investigations.

• Behavioural Level: Understand how individuals consciously evaluate social interactions across distinct dimensions. This has been addressed through behavioural experiments in which participants rate constructs like intimacy, synchrony, and presence of romantic relationships while observing social interactions.
• Interpersonal Level: Examine the extent of agreement or variability in social judgments across individuals and to investigate whether autistic traits influence this variability. Interpersonal consensus for judgements involving a scale (such as intimacy and synchrony) will be evaluated using measures of inter-rater reliability across participants. Binary judgements (such as for romantic relationships) will be evaluated looking at the percentage individual’s deviate from the majority consensus across all presented stimuli.
• Meta-Confidence: Examine how confident people are in their own judgements when assessing romantic relationships within interactions.
• Neural Level: To identify the neural systems involved in processing intimacy and synchrony. This will include examining the role of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in processing dynamic dyadic interactions, the extrastriate body area (EBA) in encoding bodily and movement-related information, and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) within the mentalising network for their contributions to relational judgments and higher-order social cognition.

So far, we have investigated dynamic interaction judgements, focusing on intimacy and synchrony, and categorical interaction judgements, focusing on romantic relationship judgements. We have also developed a 20-item SRS-2 measure using item response theory data, validated with additional research and metric invariance analysis. Additionally, we have examined the measurement equivalence of the CAT-Q across different populations, contributing to the growing psychometric evidence regarding the validity of measurements for autistic camouflaging behaviours.

In addition to my role as a mother to my son, who has non-verbal ASD, I am active within the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) community. I have considerable experience with various teaching aids as well as experience with interacting with SEND children. This experience extends to having engaged and liaised with numerous professionals who monitor and manage development of young disabled children; this has allowed me to gain insights into their contributions in assisting SEND children.

My blend of research interests and practical skills puts me in a unique position to create valuable contributions to this particular field of research, and places me in a unique position to maximise the impacts of the outcomes of research projects related to ASD.

MSc: The Effects of Loneliness and Isolation on Social Attention: Findings from an Eye-tracker Study

2022–2023

BSc: The Effect of Pairing on Voice Matching Ability

2019–2022